Where I write about running, marathons, Home Ownership, DIY projects, marriage, raising twins, growing up Polish and other Mysteries of Life

Thursday, March 13, 2014

My Two Blogs

So I was looking at the Google Analytics for this site versus my Chicago Now equivalent where I have been blogging since October 2012, and more consistently since last August. Except for an occasional abnormality or one-off, I generally get less than 200 pageviews a month here. Compare that to ChicagoNow where my readership is climbing and I am averaging 4K hits per month.
That makes a lot of sense. For one thing, CN has a built in audience that tends to read the blog post that brought them there and then they click over to other items that catch their eye. Secondly, I do more to promote those posts than I do here. I use twitter (@Icarus2013), Facebook Fan Page and occasionally Google+.

The Chicago Now blog was called Adventures in House Hunting because when I signed on to get a blog at CN, the paradigm at the time was every blog should have a focus. In other words instead of a place to dump your stream of conscience personal rantings, ravings and other BS (that's what this place is for), they wanted a variety of topics that would draw a unique and diverse readership.

I started off writing about our house hunting adventures but wasn't
very consistent because 1) my day job started to get very busy and 2) we
found a house and were under contract in early October. My hope was to
write about the search for that house in delay-mode but alas that
intention never really saw the light of day.

Once you established your blog in your subject matter, e.g. Quilting, Real Estate, Mommy blogger, etc, then you could branch off and write about whatever stroked your boat at that moment. In fact, we are often encouraged to do just that as long as we at least make an attempt to draw an audience. I guess the best way to describe it is you can write about your thoughts on why the Grammys sucked or what an Idiot such and such celebrity/politician/pop culture icon is as long as you have a point and can draw some type of audience.

Now the site is called Mysteries of Life (although the URL cannot be easily changed) because obviously we found our house and I write about all sorts of things that strike my fancy. Because people generally subscribe via email, RSS feed or plan old bookmark, there is very little risk of someone searching for this site and finding the other one or vice versa. And if they do, a reasonable intelligent person should be able to figure out which blog they were looking for and that both blogs are authored by the same dude. Or not. After all, humans.

As I mentioned, I've been blogging on Chicago Now for over a year now. The nice thing is that I can actually write
about anything I want and we are encouraged to do so, though obviously
personal crap should be reserved for ones private blog. At CN, it's all
about pagehits and traffic. Rightfully so.

We are
very fortunate that we have that avenue to post. In the days of print
media, we would be limited to physical space and competing with one
another for column space. In an electronic medium, there isn't much of a
limit I suppose.

We've had some blatherings where
I've been able to actually meet fellow CN bloggers and we also have a
private Facebook group where we also interact. I've friended about a
dozen or so bloggers.

In
an odd sort of way, the group is part family, part high school. Some
are just more popular than others. The Mommy Bloggers have an endless
supply of material to draw from and have harnessed the ability to hammer
out well written posts during nap time.